Synopsis:
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My spare tire seems loose when mounted back onto the car. I don't think it was like this before I took it off.

Story
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I just used, for the first time, my spare tire this weekend as I was fixing a couple holes caused from screws on the road in one of my tires. The fix was successful.

I just remounted my spare tire to the car this morning (giving my repaired tire a few days to see if the fixed holes would hold). (Let me say it's a pain to reattach, and I'd hate to try to get this thing off late in the night on some dark highway. Even with the rear of the car on ramps and a sliding creeper under me, I had to get completely under and use my arms to prop up the tire while I threaded the main screw in place. To dismount, you need two sockets - an 8mm socket and I think a 12mm or 13mm socket.) The spare held fine but it moved if I pushed or pulled the tire - it didn't move much, but I can imagine it slightly wobbling as I hit bumps and holes on the road. I took the tire back off and remounted to double-check I was aligning the holes and such to the same result. I took it off one more time and noticed the plastic mount piece (about 2.5-3 inches in diameter) was slightly loose and looked to be the cause of the movement, however, there was no way to screw it in or tighten it to make it not wobble. Just to make sure, I put the mounting screw on by itself without the tire guard and without the tire, tightened it up (with a torque wrench) and found that the mounting piece still wobbled - I'm concluding this piece is causing my tire not to be firmly mounted to the car when screwed in - however, it doesn't look broken, so perhaps this was how it was before I took the tire off in the first place? (I don't remember)

Any thoughts or past experience?

 

I've done it, and it wasn't bad. Dismounting was very easy, but remounting was a bit tricky. To dismount, the tools in the toolkit are all you need, and there are good instructions in the owner's manual. In the luggage compartment floor, unscrew the nut and remove the cover over the spare. Once you've done this, the only thing keeping the spare from falling to the ground is a spring clip. Screw the lifting handle onto the bolt, and use the handle to hold up the spare while you squeeze open the spring clip. This releases the spare, then lower it to the ground with the handle.

Remounting is pretty much the steps in reverse. You should not need to get under the car. First assemble the spare back into its holding tray. It should be a secure package with nothing loose. Note that there is a dome shaped plastic cap that screws onto the long bolt (more about this later). Slide the tray under the car, then comes the tricky part. You have to position the tray under the car so that the long bolt is directly under the mounting hole in the luggage compartment floor. From above, look through the hole, and you can see which direction you need to slide the tray to get it centered. When it is in position, put the lifting handle through the hole and screw it onto the bolt. You can then lift the tray back into place with the lifting handle. However, you need to lock it into the spring clip. The dome plastic cap mentioned earlier will automatically spread open the spring clip as you pull up. When you pull up far enough, the clip snaps into a groove in the plastic cap. However, this takes some effort because the spare and tray is something like 40 lbs. When lifting up with the lifting handle, gather some momentum and give it a good strong upward yank, and it should snap into the spring clip. This will hold everything while you remove the lifting handle and screw the metal cover piece back on.

Actually I thought it was a rather clever design, where the spare is under the car but you don't have to get underneath to remove/remount it. I had to do this on my cabrio, which is awkward because the cabrio tailgate is in the way and you have to bend over it while reaching into the boot and lifting 40 lbs. It should be much easier on a hardtop.

 

Thanks, rkw!

Embarrasingly, I did not think of accessing the spare from the inside of the car since I saw the three bolts accessible from the underside of the car first.

Strangely, I looked at the index in my Bentley manual and could not find "spare tire" under "tire" and "spare tire" did not show up in the index. I didn't think about looking in the standard manual...

I'll check it out later today.

 

Great!

So the spare tire was wobbly because the top nut (accessible from the trunk under the spare tire tool kit) was not tightened and was removable by finger/hand - it's actually amazing that the top nut was actually slightly fastened, granted that after removing the spare tire from under the car the nut could have become misaligned and when fastening back on, again from under the car, somehow the big bolt aligned with the nut on the topside... I'd assume that since this was the first time the spare tire has been used the nut was somehow stuck to the metal cover in the trunk area.

The saga continues - this morning I found another nail/screw on the tread of another tire...